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===================================================== NEWS BRIEFS: * Southwest Airlines Takes First ... A Bright Future for Online Travel? TOP STORY: * Phones on the Road SITE REVIEW: * Open.VisitBritain.com EDITOR'S NOTE: * This is the last edition of the Tech Traveler newsletter. Starting Thursday, it'll become Digital Living, a brand-new newsletter focusing on the wide variety of businesses - including ones in the travel industry - using new technologies to help people live a better quality of life.
NEWS
BRIEFS SOUTHWEST AIRLINES TAKES FIRST: Southwest Airlines captured the top ranking in a recent study of customer satisfaction levels among major travel-booking Web sites, as measured last month by Nielsen NetRatings and Harris Interactive. The survey rated online consumer satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, with Southwest scoring 8.62, second-place Expedia at 8.09, Continental at 7.97 and Travelocity.com coming in fourth with a score of 7.94. Web sites run by United, Delta, US Airways, American and Northwest also figured among the top 10, with Priceline.com rating 7.38 in 10th place. The rankings take into account such factors as ease of use, availability of information, flight options, pricing, duration of the shopping experience and customer service. E-MAIL IS IN THE AIR: Singapore Airlines rolled out a new in-flight e-mail service last week for passengers traveling between Singapore and Los Angeles, using technology supplied by Seattle-based Tenzing Communications. Unlike the in-flight networks Tenzing has built for Air Canada and Cathay Pacific, the Singapore Airlines system works in conjunction with the aircraft's Matsushita Avionics in-flight entertainment system to provide e-mail access and a library of cached Web pages for passengers in all classes of service. While the system does not permit a live connection to the Internet, intermittent satellite links are used to update the Web cache and send and receive e-mail stored in the on-board server. The airline says it plans to spend approximately $165 million over the next two years to install the technology throughout its entire fleet of Boeing 747 and 777 aircraft. A BRIGHT FUTURE FOR ONLINE TRAVEL? New figures from Jupiter Media Metrix offer an optimistic outlook for online travel sales. In a report published last week, the market research firm predicts that online travel purchases will triple over the next five years, from $18 billion in 2000 to $63 billion in 2006 - about 21 percent of the total U.S. market. It also reported the results of an earlier survey indicating that 29 percent of U.S. online consumers research travel and make purchases on the Internet, while 29 percent do travel research online but ultimately purchase travel products through traditional channels. The remaining 42 percent of respondents said they hadn't yet used the Internet for any travel shopping, highlighting a significant untapped market for online travel sales. "To increase their share of the growing online travel market," Jupiter analyst Heidi Kim wrote, "travel providers must vigilantly focus on increasing loyalty and wallet-share from each of their hard-won customers, in addition to converting customers who research online but purchase offline."
TOP
STORY Seamless international roaming is available to most of the world's wireless subscribers, but many U.S. travelers have been slow to catch on. By Morris Dye (morris@idiom.com) Earlier this year, Jonathan Prial, a frequent business traveler, decided to kick his two-phone habit, for good. A director of marketing and strategy for IBM who lives in Fairfield County, Connecticut, Prial takes frequent overseas trips to destinations outside the range of the code-division multiple access and time-division multiple access systems that dominate the North American digital wireless market. As a result, Prial used two wireless phones - one registered with a U.S. provider for CDMA access and one registered with a European service provider for use on the global system for mobile communication, or GSM, networks common throughout much of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Using two different phone numbers was a hassle, though, so with GSM gaining a significant foothold in North America, Prial and his 15-year-old son devised a simple test to determine whether GSM coverage had developed sufficiently for him to kick his two-phone habit for good. "I had my old phone, and I had this one," he said later, holding up a new GSM handset. "I had my son in the back seat, and we drove all around town, and he was yelling 'Three bars! One bar! Two bars!'" If enough "bars" of signal strength showed up on the GSM phone's display, Prial reasoned, he could sign up with a U.S.-based GSM service to use one phone at home and abroad. That's exactly what the GSM Association, an international trade group that is working to develop the wireless standard, hopes more Americans will do. Although GSM roaming is available to customers of most major non-GSM networks in the U.S. (AT&T's WorldConnect service and Nextel Worldwide, for example), U.S. travelers have been slow to catch on to the convenience of international roaming. The GSM Association reported last month that 401 GSM networks were on the air in 168 countries worldwide, servicing 475 million subscribers and providing more coverage than any other land-based mobile phone platform because of reciprocal service agreements between network operators. A typical British traveler, for example, can step off a plane in Munich, Moscow, Harare or Hanoi, switch on the same handset that works back home in London, and place and receive calls without having to use a different number or make a separate payment to a local phone company. And while GSM networks use different radio frequencies in different parts of the world (900, 1800 or 1900 MHz), all of the major handset manufacturers now produce dual- or tri-band models designed with global travelers in mind. Meanwhile, 6,500 cities in 48 U.S. states and six Canadian provinces have GSM coverage, according to the association, with a combined customer base exceeding 10 million users in the U.S. and Canada. (This compares with some 200 million users of CDMA and other non-GSM digital platforms in North America, according to the EMC World Cellular Database.) "Today, 99 of our top 125 international GSM partners in 48 countries can now roam to all GSM networks in North America," says Bob Brown, chairman of the association's North America interest group. While this may come as good news to some frequent travelers in the U.S., the growth of the GSM standard doesn't necessarily mean that all travelers should switch. The GSM Global Roaming Forum launched last year aims to set interoperability standards for all major wireless networks, potentially enabling users of CDMA, TDMA and other currently incompatible systems to swim in the global GSM pool. Combine these efforts with a new generation of wireless handsets - such as Motorola's i2000plus, which works with both GSM and iNet (a proprietary version of the TDMA platform) - and North American travelers will ultimately gain access to easy international roaming no matter what service they use at home. As for Jon Prial, he decided not to wait for the brave new world of open wireless standards. After completing his informal test of local network coverage, Prial asked his son in the back seat for a verdict. "He said the GSM had more reception, and I went 'Yes!' - because I really wanted that one in order to be able to carry one phone around the world." ---------------------------------------------------------------------
SITE REVIEW With Britain's normally lucrative summer holiday season approaching, negative publicity surrounding the recent outbreak of livestock diseases is causing tourists to stay away in droves. As part of its campaign to reassure international travelers, the British Tourist Authority has tacked the domain extension "open" onto the front of its usual URL and launched this frank, informative site to provide updates on the status of tourist destinations throughout the British Isles. The site's opening page addresses the epidemic (including an unequivocal statement that "foot and mouth disease is not a risk to human health") and invites travelers to register for future e-mail updates from the BTA. But the real meat of the site lies in its searchable database of specific places, events and attractions, each rated as "open to visit," "open to visit, with modified arrangements," "currently closed" or "awaiting information." Search for Stonehenge, for example, and you'll find that as of April 9, the site was open to visitors, though it now has restricted parking and an obligatory disinfectant foot bath at the entrance. Or search for Edinburgh, and you'll get a long list of attractions in and around the city, with only three currently closed to the public. Unfortunately, there's no geographical or subject index, so the only way to navigate is to type keywords into the search blanks, which is not so convenient if your sense of British geography is a bit rusty. Despite that minor gripe, however, the site serves as a useful tool for travelers because it openly confronts what promises to remain a very sticky issue for U.K. tourism officials in the months ahead. TO OUR READERS: With this final edition of Tech Traveler, we wish to thank all of our readers for subscribing. May you have many safe and productive journeys ahead. - Michael Shapiro (michaelshapiro@yahoo.com) and Morris Dye (morris@idiom.com)
STAFF Copyright 2001 Standard Media International ===================================================== |
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